Sam Biddle

And now, the great circle of tech life heads towards consummation: the scandal, the outrage, the explanation, the Majestic Non-Apologetic Apple Statement. But at least they're going to fix their privacy problem.

Apple provided the following statement to CNET:

"Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines. We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."

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Very noble of Apple to push the blame off of its own poor design onto developers, but there's one important takeaway here: a software update will require every single app to ask permission before scanning and uploading your address book. That's a very, very good thing, because clearly many app developers can't be trusted to code responsibly. For those who are popup box phobic, this will be a brief headache, but for the rest of us, be glad. Let's just hope "future" means "soon." [CNET]